STUDENTS’ IDEAS ABOUT THE HUMAN BODY: DO THEY REALLY DRAW WHAT THEY KNOW?

There are several ways for gathering information about student's knowledge. Interviews or written tests with open-ended questions may effectively elicit students in-depth thinking, but they are difficult to quantify and some times subjective. In contrast, drawings have been considered as a simple research instrument that enables easy comparisons at the international level. We investigated relationships between the level of understanding shown by university students' written responses focused on the function of bodily organs/organ systems and their ideas about the human body drawn on separate sheets of paper. We failed to find any relationship between these two methods. We propose that using the method of drawing in combination with written responses (or interviews) would provide more reliable information about children's understanding about scientific phenomena including the human body.